Cambodia V2

 

Giddy with the thrill of an unplanned holiday,

I’m in Phnom Pen with 3 Americans I hardly know

(Coz the fourth pulled out at the last minute)

Just 21, with the world unfurling before us, 

we head straight to the tourist attractions. 

Shelf after shelf of skulls line the book case

And I cannot turn away from the 10,000 eyes

Eye sockets

Trained on me

 

I check my itinerary. 

Next stop, killing fields

and

classrooms of torture. 

What is this place I have come to? 

What is its story? 

How did I end up here?

 

I see myself, staring at myself, 

in a space so quiet 

I feel the terror of the place walking beside me 

gazing at the displays together with me, and then at me

The years telescope back to 1978, 1981

I was dancing, babbling, gurgling,

when at that same second

people were piling into mass graves...

Was there a sound? 

My own mind is a black and white TV, 

playing a silent horror film

side by side 

a child toddling and a young girl falling back into the pit

her skull extracted and displayed now on this shelf. 

I am about to teach, 

I know of Holocaust Literature, 1945, an age ago, 

well before I was born

horros of the past 

what kind of a teacher am I 

that I do not know of this atrocity 

in my backyard

when I was a baby too

I step back, gutted, 

only to find myself reflected yet again

in another shelf of skulls 

I take a deep breath and walk into a classroom of torture 

a secondary school once 

how pale my own classrooms

how bright and plastic

against the liquid terror that must have once flooded this place 

S21. 

A Classroom, turned Torture Chamber 

I turn and walk now into 

the Killing Fields 

I have walked in

and I cannot wak out 

I am now 44.

After being tortured in a former secondary school classroom

I am going into teaching soon

Secondary schools

 

 

The Polpot.

I never heard of them till I went there

For a holiday

A country so ravaged

That their tourist spots are

Cambodia

Giddy with the thrill of an unplanned holiday,

I’m in Phnom Pen with 3 Americans I hardly know

(Coz the fourth pulled out at the last minute)

 

We head straight to tourist attractions

The Killing Fields

A classroom where people were tortured

A display of skulls

And I am gutted

At 21 I thought I knew things

About horrors of the world

The Holocaust, WWII

But here, I am faced with genocide in my backyard

And I reel from the shock

That when I was three, toddling and babbling,

People were being tortured and thrown into pits that turned into mass graves

Two parts of the world so different, with me oblivious in one till I was 21

And the other heaving, grieving, screaming in terror